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"Loves Me, Loves Me Not"

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“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The social science evidence says that marriage is good for us, and surveys tell us that most Americans still want to be married. But if this is true, why are we still unable to consistently make marriages work over a long period of time? Why do newlyweds like Josh and Amy start out happy, but have trouble later on? How we think about marriage, and the amount of time and effort we put into a marriage are certainly important to making the relationship work. However, a major reason for our poor marriage record is the fact that the average American simply lacks the necessary tools for living with and loving another human being. As Diane Sollee suggests, when it comes to marriage, we’re running out on the field, trying to play football, but we don’t understand the rules or know any plays. We naively think we can win the game with spirit and enthusiasm alone.

The good news is that the skills needed to improve and strengthen our marriages, are skills, which can be acquired by everyone with a little time and effort. Diane Sollee is the director of the Coalition for Marriage, Couples and Family Therapy, an organization, which provides training for couples in all stages of a relationship, including premarital couples. Along with sponsoring a national marriage conference each year, they provide vital resources for couples to find specific help and training for their marriages.

Communication and conflict resolution are especially important to making a marriage last, but these are skills that don’t come naturally and that most of us haven’t learned. That is why education is so important. BYU professors, Dr. Thomas Holman and Dr. Jeffry Larson have studied other important factors that contribute to the overall health of a marriage and the chances of it being a life long union. Among them are:

1. Age of each partner at time of marriage
2. Support from family and friends
3. Communication skills
4. Similarity of attitudes
5. Mental health
6. Concepts of gender roles
7. Sex

Dr. Holman and Dr. Larson have developed a relationship evaluation test, which helps both dating and married couples discover potential problem areas and forces them to realize which factors are important to their specific relationship. The evaluation program, called RELATE, is a great resource for couples struggling to determine if or how to stay together. (http://www.relate.byu.edu) If the man and woman are comfortable and see eye to eye in these areas, they will have fewer problems and conflicts in their relationship.

Obviously, choosing a mate is fundamental to having a long, happy marriage (we couldn’t just marry anyone and expect to become compatible through sheer effort), but many of these areas can be worked and improved upon even after we marry. The myth suggesting that if we are unhappy in a marriage it is because we simply chose the wrong partner is very misleading. Such a myth makes us believe that there is one right person for us to marry. If we marry someone then, and decide later that they weren’t the one, we take full advantage of our country’s ‘no-fault’ divorce laws and end our marriages when we become unhappy, thinking next time we’ll marry that one right person.

In reality, every couple will have as many as ten irreconcilable differences. When we divorce and marry someone else, we’ll just discover new differences, which we won’t be able to resolve. Successful couples don’t resolve all differences, but learn to accept and deal with those differences through mutual love and respect for each other’s views. If we are aware of the common pitfalls in marriages and have the resources to learn how to overcome them, the dream of a long, fulfilling marriage will have a much better chance than just 50/50.